


The Slytherin Ghost

by Lefaym



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canonical Character Death, Future Fic, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-13
Updated: 2015-03-13
Packaged: 2018-03-17 17:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3538154
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lefaym/pseuds/Lefaym
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are many stories about the Slytherin ghost, who rose when the Dark Lord died. And Old Al Potter's are the strangest of them all...</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Slytherin Ghost

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fera_festiva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fera_festiva/gifts).



> For my dearest fera_festiva, without whom I would not have written this story, and who kindly looked over it for me.

The Slytherin ghost is not like the ghosts of other houses. The others have roamed the castle for hundreds of years, but little more than a century has passed since the Slytherin ghost first appeared. He is known by many names -- the Potions Master, the Half-Blood Spy, the Severed Prince -- but most Slytherins simply call him the ghost.

There was another ghost once, who watched over Slytherin house, but the Bloody Baron left when the new ghost made himself known. The Baron now haunts a cursed wood in Albania, and they say that he stood aside, or perhaps he was forced, at the close of the second war when the Dark Lord met his end. Perhaps indeed the Baron feared the spectre who rose the night the Dark Lord died.

The Baron was right to fear him, too, if the stories are true. They say the Slytherin ghost could brew a draught that healed as it killed, protecting its victim until the moment of death. They say that he was the most trusted of the Dark Lord’s lieutenants; the most loyal, elevated above all, but still too cowardly to go on into death when his life’s blood streamed from the dark, jagged wounds in his neck. Or they say that he stayed behind to finish the Dark Lord’s work, that no child of Muggle birth escapes his notice, though he can do nothing to harm them from beyond the veil. And there are stories, too, whispered by nervous first years, that he searches the castle every night, looking for a pair of green eyes; when he finds them, so the stories go, he will achieve the end he has so long desired…

None dare ask him about it; nor would it do any good if they did, for the Slytherin ghost does not speak. It may be that he cannot speak, that the wound in his throat cut to his very soul, and his lost voice is punishment for his crimes. Some say he doesn’t need to speak; that his glare alone can turn your heart to ice.

But not everyone believes these stories. Old Al Potter will tell anyone who ventures into the Hog’s Head of a Friday night that the stories are bunk, that the Slytherin ghost saved them all. The Slytherin ghost was a spy for the Chosen One, Al says; the ghost alone knew the Dark Lord’s greatest secret, the secret that lead to his downfall. On the night of the battle, he searched vainly for the Chosen One, but the Dark Lord discovered his treachery and killed him before he could relay his message. And so the Slytherin ghost refused to go on into death, and damned himself to eternal half-life, that he might secure the Dark Lord’s defeat.

Of course, Old Al is crazy, they say; as crazy as his old man before him, if the Skeeter biographies are to be believed. Others whisper that Al dabbled in the Dark Arts as a boy -- why else, after all, was he sorted into Slytherin house, the only member of the highly entangled Potter-Weasley clan to attain this dubious honour? And there are doubts, too, about any family stories he may have heard at his father’s knee. It’s said now that Al’s father was not the Chosen One at all, that the venerable Longbottom, who faced the Dark Lord at the gates of Hogwarts itself, was the one destined to save them all. They say that Al’s father never denied it, when he was asked. Who knows what Old Al was told as a boy? Who knows if his tales of the Slytherin ghost are anything more than the deluded fantasies of a lonely old man?

Certainly, some of Old Al’s claims cannot be true -- he says the Dark Lord’s soul was bound inside his mother’s book; he says that his father saw that soul, and it was a child begging for help. Al even claims that the Slytherin ghost spoke to him once or twice, because the ghost is willing to talk to those who do not try his patience. There are few who do anything other than laugh, when Old Al gets talking.

But then there are those who look into Al’s eyes and see that they are green, and they wonder, they wonder… and they look back on their own days at Hogwarts, and they recall that no Muggle-born child ever came to harm in the presence of the Slytherin ghost, and they remember that those who feared him most were the ones who tried to revive the old hatreds, the old prejudices against those of Muggle birth. Perhaps Old Al is not so crazy as he seems, they think, those few who look.

It cannot be long now before Old Al passes from this world; there are few left of his generation, the first born after the war. Perhaps his stories of the Slytherin ghost will pass with him, or they will twist and turn, as stories do, into something else entirely. Only the ghost will remain, unable or unwilling to tell what he knows. And at night the children will whisper, and the ghost will watch them, alone.


End file.
